Latest news with #ParliamentaryLabourParty
ITV News
7 days ago
- Politics
- ITV News
Starmer suspends rebellious MPs
Sir Keir Starmer has carried out a purge of troublesome backbenchers as he suspended a number of MPs. Rachael Maskell, who spearheaded plans to halt the Government's welfare reforms, has lost the whip, alongside Neil Duncan-Jordan, Brian Leishman and Chris Hinchliff. All voted against the Government's benefits reforms as part of a wider rebellion earlier this month, and all aside from Ms Maskell were first elected at last year's election. The York Central MP said she had been suspended for 'standing up for my constituents' over the benefits plans. Ms Maskell said she had a 'positive conversation' with the chief whip, adding: 'He knows my heart and why I did what I did. 'I explained there are lines I can't cross because of where I come from in politics with my faith.' She said she was 'not angry' but 'upset that we are in this place because I believe we are better than that as a party. I believe that strength comes from the backbenches.' Mr Duncan-Jordan has said he remains 'as committed as ever' to Labour values, but accepted that voting against the welfare plans 'could come at a cost'. In a statement, the MP for Poole said: 'Since being elected, I have consistently spoken up for my constituents on a range of issues, including most recently on cuts to disability benefits. 'I understood this could come at a cost, but I couldn't support making disabled people poorer. 'Although I've been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party today, I've been part of the Labour and trade union movement for 40 years and remain as committed as ever to its values.' Mr Leishman said he is a 'proud Labour member' and remains 'committed to the party'. The office of the MP for Alloa and Grangemouth confirmed he had had the whip 'temporarily suspended'. 'I wish to remain a Labour MP and deliver the positive change many voters are craving,' Mr Leishman said in a statement. 'I have voted against the Government on issues because I want to effectively represent and be the voice for communities across Alloa and Grangemouth. 'I firmly believe that it is not my duty as an MP to make people poorer, especially those that have suffered because of austerity and its dire consequences.' A Labour backbencher described the suspensions as 'devastating' and said they did not signal a willingness from the Government to reset relations with the parliamentary party. As well as the suspensions, three other MPs have been removed from trade envoy jobs: Rosena Allin-Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammad Yasin. It is understood that those who have been suspended have had the whip removed due to repeated infringements when it comes to party discipline. Mr Duncan-Jordan raised concerns about the Government's changes to the winter fuel allowance before the U-turn while Mr Leishman has been a critic of the Government's response to the Grangemouth closure. Mr Hinchliff led a rebellion against ministers' planning Bill over environmental concerns. Shadow minister Richard Holden claimed that the suspensions are 'a desperate attempt to distract from yet another surge in inflation today'. Richard Burgon, who lost the Labour whip last year after he rebelled on the two-child benefit cap but has since had it reinstated said that those who have been suspended 'were simply standing up for their disabled constituents and following their consciences'. In a statement on X, he added: 'Challenging policies that harm our communities, that damage Labour's support and that make a Reform government much more likely is a key role of Labour backbenchers. 'The Prime Minister should be listening to these voices, not punishing them.' The Fire Brigades Union have called the move an 'outrageous and authoritarian act' and claimed the Labour leadership have 'learned nothing from the huge outpouring of anger that the cuts to welfare have provoked'.
Rhyl Journal
7 days ago
- Politics
- Rhyl Journal
Starmer suspends rebellious MPs
Rachael Maskell, who spearheaded plans to halt the Government's welfare reforms, has lost the whip, alongside Neil Duncan-Jordan, Brian Leishman and Chris Hinchliff. All voted against the Government's benefits reforms as part of a wider rebellion earlier this month, and all aside from Ms Maskell were first elected at last year's election. The York Central MP said she had been suspended for 'standing up for my constituents' over the benefits plans. Ms Maskell said she had a 'positive conversation' with the chief whip, adding: 'He knows my heart and why I did what I did. 'I explained there are lines I can't cross because of where I come from in politics with my faith.' She said she was 'not angry' but 'upset that we are in this place because I believe we are better than that as a party. I believe that strength comes from the backbenches.' Mr Duncan-Jordan has said he remains 'as committed as ever' to Labour values, but accepted that voting against the welfare plans 'could come at a cost'. In a statement, the MP for Poole said: 'Since being elected, I have consistently spoken up for my constituents on a range of issues, including most recently on cuts to disability benefits. 'I understood this could come at a cost, but I couldn't support making disabled people poorer. 'Although I've been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party today, I've been part of the Labour and trade union movement for 40 years and remain as committed as ever to its values.' Mr Leishman said he is a 'proud Labour member' and remains 'committed to the party'. The office of the MP for Alloa and Grangemouth confirmed he had had the whip 'temporarily suspended'. 'I wish to remain a Labour MP and deliver the positive change many voters are craving,' Mr Leishman said in a statement. 'I have voted against the Government on issues because I want to effectively represent and be the voice for communities across Alloa and Grangemouth. 'I firmly believe that it is not my duty as an MP to make people poorer, especially those that have suffered because of austerity and its dire consequences.' A Labour backbencher described the suspensions as 'devastating' and said they did not signal a willingness from the Government to reset relations with the parliamentary party. As well as the suspensions, three other MPs have been removed from trade envoy jobs: Rosena Allin-Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammad Yasin. It is understood that those who have been suspended have had the whip removed due to repeated infringements when it comes to party discipline. Mr Duncan-Jordan raised concerns about the Government's changes to the winter fuel allowance before the U-turn while Mr Leishman has been a critic of the Government's response to the Grangemouth closure. Mr Hinchliff led a rebellion against ministers' planning Bill over environmental concerns. Shadow minister Richard Holden claimed that the suspensions are 'a desperate attempt to distract from yet another surge in inflation today'.
Telegraph
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Starmer: I'm a hard bastard
Sir Keir Starmer has claimed he is a 'hard bastard' as marked the first anniversary of his time in Downing Street. The Prime Minister made the quip in an interview with Nick Robinson on BBC Radio 4's Political Thinking podcast one year on from the general election. Mr Robinson said he had been told by one of Sir Keir's five-a-side football teammates that he was a 'hard bastard'. The presenter asked: 'Are you a hard enough bastard to look in the mirror to say I've got to change, the party's got to change, something serious has to change in year two for Keir Starmer?' Sir Keir responded: 'We need to reflect on where things haven't gone according to plan [...] but we also need to emphasise the very many good things we have done.' Adding that he was 'really proud' of his record in office, he said: 'I'm a hard enough bastard to find out who it was who said that, so that I can have a discussion with him.' The first year of Sir Keir's premiership has seen Labour tank in the polls, two ministers quit his front bench and a number of about-turns on major policies. He was forced to tear up large parts of his flagship welfare Bill to starve off a Labour revolt. Asked if was a football manager who had 'lost the dressing room' after 49 MPs voted against his reforms, Sir Keir said: 'Absolutely not, Nick. As soon as we go through the long list of things that we've achieved this year, the Labour dressing room – the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] – is proud as hell of what we've done. 'And their frustration, my frustration, is that sometimes the other stuff, welfare would be an example, can obscure us being able to get that out. But you'll be hearing a lot from me about that.' Sir Keir also expanded on the bond he has struck up with Donald Trump since the US president returned to the White House in January, despite a sharp contrast in their policies and leadership styles. The Prime Minister admitted last week that a focus on international affairs had distracted him from the recent rebellion over welfare reforms. Asked if he was spending 'too much time' with the likes of Mr Trump instead of his own MPs, he replied: 'It is important to have a good relationship with President Trump – it is in the national interest. 'But it also helped us when we were negotiating a trade deal.' When it was pointed out that he and Mr Trump were very different, Sir Keir said: 'We are different people and we've got different political backgrounds and leanings, but we do have a good relationship and that comes from a number of places. 'I think I do understand what anchors the president – what he really cares about – but also we have a good personal relationship. 'The first time I ever spoke to him was when I picked up the phone to him after he had been shot when he was at a rally before he became president. 'And that was a phone call really to ask him how it was and in particular I wanted to know how it had impacted on his family. So that was the beginning of his relationship.' Discussing the relationship they have beyond 'important matters of state', he added: 'I think for both of us we really care about family and there's a point of connection there in terms of how we care about our families. 'In having a good relationship with President Trump we were able to do a trade deal.' The UK-US trade deal came into force on Monday after being signed in June and has reduced tariffs for the British automotive and aerospace sectors. Sir Keir recalled receiving a call from Mr Trump a few days after Nick Starmer, his younger brother, died on Boxing Day after fighting cancer. Reflecting on the loss of his brother, Sir Keir said he had been a 'very vulnerable man' and that he would not have wanted his stage-four diagnosis to come under the spotlight. 'I made it my business to be there in the hospital when he was told so that I could begin to help to look after him,' he added. 'I don't think he would have wanted or withstood any public knowledge of where he was at. And I wanted fiercely to protect him and that's why both before and after the election I went secretly to see him at home, secretly to see him in hospital, he was in intensive care for a long time.' Sir Keir continued: 'It was important for me to do that to support him and very important for me not to share that with the world because this was my brother – I deeply cared about him and I wanted to and would always have protected him and his privacy.'
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Is Keir Starmer turning into Harold Wilson?
Photo by Henry Nicholls -Another week and another crisis for Keir Starmer after another U-turn. It should not be like this, of course. He is one year into a five-year parliament with a working majority of 165. The Conservative Party is in free fall. Nigel Farage leads a party with just five MPs. And yet something is clearly wrong in this government. The Parliamentary Labour Party is refusing to be led. Hostile briefings are everywhere. The Chancellor is under attack; so too the Prime Minister's most influential adviser. Starmer himself appears remorseful, apologetic and unsure what to do, searching for a sense of mission and direction, assailed from all directions by the kind of advice no one wants. There is a scene in Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wilson that I cannot shake at moments like this. Wilson was a wily intellect and an even wilier politician, able to dodge and weave to keep his party together and himself in power. He also had a clear sense of direction, promising to modernise Britain and reinvigorate its faltering economy. It was a sparkling prospectus, delivered with sparkling rhetoric. And yet, it failed. By 1976, after an unlikely return to power, Wilson retired a broken man, drinking in the afternoon, quick to tears, mournful and unsure. Before he left office, he told one interviewer that he hoped to spend more time thinking about the country's problems. I once retold this bathetic story of political history to one of Starmer's closest aides, warning him of the dangers of power without a clear sense of direction. I tried to make a joke of it, not wanting to be too Eeyorish. Still, Wilson's fate seems to hang over this government in some strange, spectral fashion. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,' Karl Marx once observed. So they do. Whether Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, it often seems as though our ruling class is haunted by the traditions of those who came before, a feeling captured on page 50 by Nicholas Harris's review of Shifty, Adam Curtis's new series about Britain in the run-up to the millennium. Our new culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, is haunted by different ghosts on page 32. In many ways Starmer is underestimated as a politician. Although the calibre of prime ministers has noticeably declined since Wilson's day, it still requires skill, political acumen and what might generously be called 'wiles' to reach the pinnacle of British politics. (The most powerful leader in this issue isn't even a politician: read Zoë Huxford on page 33 to see what I mean.) Starmer has all these traits and more. Yet the man before us today looks far more like late Wilson than he should at this stage of his premiership. At the heart of Starmer's apparent crisis of confidence lies a crisis of direction. From as early as 1967, Wilson began to lose his verve after abandoning his economic plans and devaluing the pound. In Pimlott's telling, Wilson's failure to see through his economic plan became a crisis for social democracy itself, which never really lifted. Without economic planning, what does Labour stand for, Pimlott asked? For a while Blair and Gordon Brown appeared to answer this question, but their model – as we can now see – died with the financial crisis of 2008. In many ways, Starmer's crisis is the reverse of Wilson's. His plan cannot be said to have failed, because he did not have one to begin with. Rather, his struggles are those of a man searching for a plan and finding instead a fleeting politics, as Finn McRedmond finds at Glastonbury on page 8. My ambition for the New Statesman is to step into this obvious ideological void on the left of politics; to be a journal of ideas that can help light a new direction for this government, and for progressive politics more generally. Our cover story this week begins this process. As Will Dunn writes on page 20, it is time for the government to confront our baffling, irrational tax system, which fails to raise enough for the kind of country we all want to live in. Without a clear direction, Starmer is being pulled in all directions. His friends urge him – in private and, it seems, in public – to ignore the Blairites, move left and abandon his hopes of recovering voters lost to Reform. Those of a more Tony-ish hue whisper to me and others that this is the siren call of Milibandism. A battle is now underway for Starmer's ear – and for the soul of this government. As both Andrew Marr and George Eaton write, a new politics is opening up, one that is far more radical and dangerous for both of Britain's main political parties than before. History appears first as tragedy, and then as farce, Marx observed. It seems he knew what he was talking about. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: The rebellions against Starmer are only just beginning] Related
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
These disability benefit cuts are about to bury Labour
Photo by'Vote against this bill and we will call an election and lose to Reform, or vote for the bill and lose the next election to Reform.' That is the gambit reportedly being pushed in front of Labour MPs by the whip's office this week; with Liz Kendall's disability benefit slashing bill heading towards its second reading on the 1st of July. With the brave resignation of former Shadow Disability Minister Vicky Foxcroft last Thursday the Parliamentary Labour Party might finally wake up to the implications of what they're being asked to do. So, like a gangster coming-to dangled over the edge of a bridge, hearing the river flowing below, looking down to realise Kendall has doused their shoes in cement; Labour MPs have found a terrible realisation setting in. My early career was spent in housing and homelessness. As I read through the details of the bill I found myself making a mental checklist of the people I helped as an outreach worker for Headway and other organisations. Wondering who would lose out under the new rules. Society's ignored; a scary and inconvenient reminder of the fragility of life. People that, in the coming months, will be thrust into the spotlight as the cuts began to bite. Graeme, a Tower Hamlets resident who had been set upon by a group of men with baseball bats in his early twenties and suffered extreme concussion. Graeme had become forgetful as a result of his injuries. His flat's walls covered with notes to remind him to do basic chores and tasks. Aged only 33, he wore a sanitary pad due to the incontinence that was the legacy of his broken nerves and synapses. He would spend his benefit on trips to Headway with his father that were his only monthly opportunity to safely leave the house. Marcello, who had been in a motorcycle accident in his youth and now lived in a mouse-infested flat in the Isle Of Dogs with his profoundly autistic older brother. Marcello who would emit a scream every time he stood up and leant on a broken spine. A laborious process that took several minutes of rocking back and forth and culminated in a pain so powerful that it penetrated a prescription of sedative medications longer than my forearm. His benefit spent on a cleaner and one day, he hoped, cooking lessons. Valdas, who had been in an industrial accident after moving to the UK and who gleefully showed me the tiny keyboard he had bought with his benefit to teach himself piano. Who two months after our first meeting I received a suicidal call from and found with two concerned friends keeping vigil. Laying on his sofa, deep in a trench of mood disordered despair resulting from his head injury. I remembered my first job at Washington Galleries. The one that brought me into the labour movement as a teenager; processing miners claims as part of the Coal Health Compensation Schemes brought in by Blair. Learning how just how many of the old men in the miners cottages down the road in Shiney Row were ruined by Vibration White Finger and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. A relic of a different era when Labour still felt some need to show that it felt affinity with working class life. These are the people that Labour pretends will be brought back into the workforce quickly enough to justify the paltry twelve weeks grace they will be given when the bill is passed. People that will have to cut down to bare essentials and will visit food banks in their thousands when this imaginary explosion of jobs in the most economically depressed parts of Britain inevitably doesn't happen. My examples are from working in London but the biggest victims of the policy will be in the parts of the UK already devastated by deindustrialisation and poverty. Places that should find Labour an instinctive ally. The Red Wall of the North East and North West that delivered a victory to Boris Johnson and then to Kier Starmer is set to see the most hurt. Easington, the former colliery town in Durham where Billy Elliot was filmed and that has a child poverty rate over 40%, is the worst per-head loser in England. There, the community will lose an estimated £24 million in income from disability benefits. That is money that will not be spent in shops, public transport and services. What will the vast slashing of money be replaced with that Labour has planned for Easington? nothing. The former coal town typifies the abject cruelty of Kendall's bill. The typical loser will be a man over 40, not yet retired, dealing with a chronic pain condition of the muscles or skeleton, living in a part of Britain that has been ripped to shreds by globalisation. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The word 'change' that accompanied a grey photograph of Starmer in the 2024 manifesto has been thoroughly undermined. This is the same subtly sociopathic politics that has typified Britain for a generation – where the 'left behind' areas whose industry built Britain and who were then discarded in favour of London's finance sector are seen as an unfortunate drag on society. Something that politicians wish would just go away. Kendall's bill is another of many attempts at holding down the pillow on the patient's face, hoping to hear the ECG chirp to a flatline. But Labour is more likely murder itself, as anyone looking at the claimant numbers in each parliamentary seat will know. In May, 36 Labour MPs sent a letter of support to Kendall. None of this mostly new to parliament collection of Oxbridge graduates, consultants, multiple-landlords, lobbyists and NGO staff have worked the kind of role that would leave them with broken knees and painful spines by 50. Many have the kind of majority that almost guarantees this will be their only term in parliament and so have little to lose themselves. But even those signatories with larger majorities will see themselves and long-serving party colleagues ejected from the House Of Commons should the bill pass. In May the journalist Chaminda Jayanetti compared the number of affected PIP claimants in each seat to the majority of each parliamentarian. Presuming, of course, that this group voted in its entirety in 2024, and that the longstanding 'disability vote gap' of 6.2% is removed – something entirely plausible when so many will feel the cuts so profoundly. The electoral picture generated is dire for Labour. Subtract the affected PIP claimant number from the total number of votes in each constituency and Labour loses more than 50 MPs. Aforementioned signatories like Danny Beales, Jim Dickson and David Pinto-Duschinksy go. Big public names like Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips go, too. But imagine a scenario where the PIP claimant takes two family members or friends into the 'not-voting Labour' column. Family and friends that have seen someone close to them lose out in such a visceral and obvious way. Suddenly it becomes clear that this bill represents the Labour right's parliamentary sojourners tying themselves to their colleagues and leaping into the abyss. In this scenario almost 230 Labour MPs lose their seats: Ed Miliband is gone. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson also goes. The bill's chief proponents in the media, like Wolverhampton South East's Pat Mcfadden and Swansea MP Torsten Bell (whose think tank Resolution Foundation once railed against the same cuts under the Conservatives) are both also gone. Of course, in this plausible scenario, Liz Kendall also loses her seat. Perhaps she and her colleagues see this as a price worth paying to cut disability benefit. Labour MPs need to ask themselves whether they agree, before the horror stories that will inevitably come from this bill start to make headlines. [See also: Keir Starmer's Labour Party can't survive another crisis.] Related
